At assembly at the Park View Academy, David Lammy tells a great story. His own. "I grew up in Dongola Road just round the corner - do some of you know that? I come from a very typical Tottenham family. I didn't have a dad. He left, and I had a mum struggling with five of us. I had older brothers. Some of them got in trouble with the police, alcohol and drugs, all of those sorts of things..."

To his audience - more than 50% black - he skirts over some of what happened next: how, after he left Downhills primary, virtually next door to Park View, he took up a scholarship as a chorister at the King's School in Peterborough; how after university in London he became the first black Briton to study for a law masters at Harvard. But he ends with a scene in this same hall, when he became the Labour candidate for this constituency after Bernie Grant's death. "I walked in as an ordinary person and I walked out as the prospective MP for Tottenham."
Lammy, still the same side of 30 as they are, adds a small homily. "People encouraged me to take what I think is a very important commodity at school, which is to get as much of your teachers' brains as you can... that is a passport to success. That is for free. All you have to do is listen, take it in and you are off."

Lammy's example is complex, for he left Haringey to fulfil his potential. Trevor Phillips, the broadcaster and deputy chairman of the London Assembly, another black Tottenham schoolboy, also left the borough, for school in Guyana. "We were
escapees," says Phillips. "We were lucky - if we had stayed where most of our contemporaries stayed I don't think any of us would have ended up doing what we are doing now."

Park View used to be called Langham school, which was threatened with takeover by a government hit squad, and never got more than one in eight of its leavers achieving five good GCSEs. It was given a "fresh start" in 1999, with a new head, 75% new staff and a £10m building programme partly funded by the private-finance initiative.

The head, Peter Walker, has changed the timetable, changed the canteen, and set staggeringly high targets. He wants to increase the GCSE pass rate at five Cs or better from 15% last year, to 25% this year and 40% within five years. Numbers are up to 980 and heading for 1,100 next year. Parents who wouldn't consider the old school are turning to the new one. Here, 81% of pupils speak English as an additional language and 64 languages are spoken, from Kurdish to Twi, one of the main languages spoken in Ghana. The school is proud of its multiculturalism, which spreads through the teaching staff, too. Of the 100 members of staff at all levels, 46 are from an ethnic minority background.

"In a school like this there is such diversity in the student population it would be crass of me not to build a staff of quality which displays that diversity. We have a chance to model a world community in this school," says Walker. The school's vision statement talks of "a learning community which recognises and celebrates the ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity of staff, students and neighbourhood." The school concert featured soca music, Caribbean carols, Turkish folk songs and a jazz band.

And there is burning aspiration. All but one of the year 9 school council want to go to university; one of them, Edward Commodore Mensah, has been taken into the Spurs football academy - their coaches come in to train youngsters twice a week. With just one youth centre in the area, after-school activities are much in demand. Edward mentions the internet access; Grant Molyneux-Beckett says after-school activities are "for keeping people out of trouble most of the time", but rates the football, basketball and table tennis.

"There's a little too much violence - between Turkish and black, basically," says one student, but the thing they dislike the most about the school is what others say about its past, and having to convince people that it is different now.
Phillips, a member of the education management board on Haringey council, says the borough is now focused on achievement. "There was for a long time a fashion that said, 'We need to make the children comfortable and wanted and that's what makes the difference.' Actually, what makes children feel comfortable is achievement. You don't say we are going to spend a large amount of teaching time doing cross-cultural things but what we are going to do is make it easier to pass some exams and help you get a job."

But generations-old migration of around 50% of Haringey children to secondary schools in other boroughs can't be turned around overnight. Never mind Harvard: currently just 25 students from schools in Lammy's constituency go to university each year. Within Haringey, Park View has threats old and new: a single girls' school helps to skew the admissions to around two-thirds boys, one-third girls at Park View; a new city academy is on the way, backed by the church of England, at St David's and St Katharine's. Park View is to apply to become a specialist language college next year.

A lot of Labour's education initiatives have had a huge influence on Park View. But when Diane Abbott, MP for neighbouring Hackney North and Stoke Newington, accused the government of failing to tackle one of the core issues confronting schools like Park View, the poor results of black children, she touched a nerve. She spoke of the "silent catastrophe" of the failure of British education to engage black children, especially black boys.

Why was it, she asked, that black children enter the system at five, at the same level as white and Asian students, but are miles behind at 16? Fifty-six per cent of white students achieve five Cs or better at GCSE, but only 39% of their black counterparts achieve the same success. In London it is even worse, especially among black boys, where only 13% achieve five Cs or better. "It is an issue no one wants to address," said Abbott, even though it had been a recognised problem for at least a quarter of a century. One solution was to bring more black male teachers in. "You can discuss the underachievement of boys. But not how the system fails black boys... strategies for addressing male under-achievement are not working with black boys."

Abbott is among Tony Blair's least favourite MPs. But from the government, complaints were muted. Stephen Timms, the school standards minister, acknowledged a lack of male role models in the classroom. Shortly afterwards a report by Audrey Osler and others at Leicester University for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed that black girls are four times more likely to be excluded than white girls.

In 1998, the last available figures, 7% of primary and 8% of secondary recruits to teacher training were from ethnic minorities - slightly above the proportion in the population as a whole. But the Teacher Training Agency can't break down that figure between ethnic minorities any further. Equality issues are discussed during teacher training, but raising ethnic minority achievement is not a mandatory part of the course. Lionel McCalman, senior lecturer in the school of education at the University of East London, recommends financial incentives for teacher training colleges, like UEL, with a good record of attracting ethnic minority trainees.

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) doesn't record the number of ethnic minority teachers working; though Professor Osler, using data from the Labour Force Survey, has extrapolated that just 2.9% of teachers were from ethnic minorities. In Birmingham in 2000, while half the school population was from an ethnic minority, only one in ten teachers were from ethnic communities. Retaining black teachers, says Prof Osler, is a major but as yet unquantified problem.

There is money available: the government is providing £450m in ethnic minority achievement grants to help raise attainment; but there are complaints that the
distribution is erratic and there is little in the way of sharing best practice. There is a national strategy in education for just about everything - but not yet on this issue.

The DfES, says Cathy Ashton, the junior schools minister, is doing some hard thinking on this issue. Phillips introduced representatives from Muslim organisations to her last week and she is going to meet with them again.

"This is one of the fundamental issues that we need to address urgently as part of our drive to raise standards in all schools," said a DfES official last week. "We plan to build on the excellent work that is already under way with many good schools, working closely with our partners in education - teachers, headteachers, LEAs and governors - to build knowledge and understanding and develop a strategy which ensures that all of our children achieve the best that they are able to." Osler is collecting information for ministers on LEA strategies for raising ethnic minority achievement and spending of the ethnic minority achievement grant - though not yet making a judgement on their success. Maybe - just maybe - a national strategy is in the offing.

Abbott has been to see Stephen Timms and says the reaction at ministerial level has been "quite positive". But she remains sceptical: "I think there is an institution inertia at the DfES on this issue. They have put their faith in a colour-blind approach but a colour-blind approach demonstrably doesn't work," she says. She doesn't deny that circumstances and family background also have an effect on black children, and teachers tend to be liberal with a small L. "So they are pretty upset by any notion that they are unfair to black children. But the figures don't lie. It's very difficult to explain away the massive differences in achievement."

Lammy is important here, too. He is parliamentary private secretary to Estelle Morris, the education secretary: tongue-tied, bound to support the government, but with day-to-day access to the most senior minister and her officials. He has shared platforms with Abbott before. He says the literacy and numeracy strategies have helped black children, and is enthusiastic about the work Ashton is undertaking. "The fact that we have got to the stage where the data is being collected and maintained is a big advance," Lammy says. "I think that Diane Abbott has begun a very, very important debate within the education world that teachers should welcome right across the country... the fact remains that to be black in this country is to be disadvantaged at school, at work and in accessing public services. The Labour party is committed to alleviating that situation."

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